Homelessness and rootlessness - Interview Rasmus A Hungnes with Per Christian Brown, 2024
Rasmus Hungnes: Dreams and daydreams, belonging, impermanence, and memories are recurrent themes in your artistic practice. They are also present in your current exhibition, ‘For we are such stuff as dreams are made on – and our little life is rounded with a sleep.’ Here, this subject matter is juxtaposed with documentary video work and photos portraying homeless people and their places of lack of permanent residence. How, when, and where did your exploration of homelessness begin?
Per Christian Brown: In March 2020, I was stranded in Berlin because of the coronavirus pandemic. Society had been immobilized by an unknown and extremely contagious virus. We heard about enormous death tolls in places such as China and Italy, and kept receiving messages from the authorities instructing us to stay at home and keep our distance from other people. I started wondering, how would those living on the streets would be able to isolate? How could they comply with social distancing, avoid the virus, and not get sick and end up dying in a hospital bed?
I decided to get in touch with Manuell, a homeless man I had met during the pre-production of my project ‘The House’, which would eventually be finalized the following year, in 2021. I told him I wanted to do a photo- and video based documentary art project about homelessness, and that it would be published online so that other people could gain insight into what it was like being homeless during the pandemic, when galleries and museums were inaccessible. He introduced me to various homeless people in the German capital, and the website meinHeim.org (My Home) was launched four months later, in July 2020. Here, one can view video interviews and photo portraits of twelve homeless people, each with very different personalities, backgrounds, and destinies. They were paid in gift cards that could be spent on food, clothes, and other necessities.
RH: One of the works in the exhibition is a new photo series depicting homeless people sleeping in their regular spots, another one is a ~45 minute video work about a homeless Berliner named Manuell, in which he tells his life story and reveals how he became homeless. Why did you choose to make a piece about him, and what has been his role in the realization of the exhibition? Who is Manuell?
PCB: Manuell has been my most important partner during my work with homeless people. He has made an immense contribution, he’s been traveling all over Berlin around the clock to find homeless people willing to be portrayed and participate. If it hadn't been for Manuel’s determination and hard work, I wouldn’t have been able to realize meinHeim.org or the photo series shown in this exhibition. Manuell is an incredibly strong and resourceful person. He is one of the best people I know. He represents the opposite of what people tend to associate with people who are homeless. His everyday existence exposes common prejudices against and ideas many of us hold about these people who have fallen – or been thrown – out of ‘normal’ society. Manuell’s social circle consists of both other homeless people and completely ‘ordinary’ people. He earns a living doing gardening for a number of wealthy people in and around the Wannsee district of Berlin, and assists in distributing food for various charities several times a week. He is not an addict of drugs or alcohol, and is a vital part of the wellbeing of Berlin’s homeless community. To my mind, it seems important to document his engagement as well as his personal story.
RH: Towards the end of the piece, you mention that Manuell has no identity papers. A clip shows a close-up of the way he gesticulates with his hands, and we see that several of his fingers are gone. Us viewers can only speculate around what has happened to his hands, but it’s clear that Manuell has experienced and witnessed extreme brutality. He says he’ll lose several nights’ sleep if he allows himself to recall his most painful memories.
PCB: Yes, Manuell suffers from chronic insomnia and is haunted by trauma from his military service abroad. At a certain point, he chose desertion – abandoned his post. When he lived homeless in Hamburg in 2018, he was robbed of his passport and ID papers. He has not been issued new documents, and is effectively non-existent as a German citizen and in its official records. He has made attempts at retrieving his official identity with the help of lawyers, thus far without success. It has been and still is an uphill battle. But, as he says, he’s comfortable living this way for now; under the radar so to speak, being ‘invisible’, incognito. Manuell knows several fellow ex-soldiers who also suffer from deep trauma and don’t receive proper support from the German military or authorities. Who knows what the future holds for them, but at some point, he’ll have to resume the battle in order to get a small government pension. You can’t survive sleeping outdoors in a tent in the cold of winter forever.
RH: In another video piece in the exhibition, we get to witness the disintegration of family photos. The following detail is not revealed by the piece itself, but you have let me know that the photographs – that you’ve found in various flea markets and second-hand shops – are actually immersed in chlorine baths, and what we are looking at is the detachment of pigments from their supports and reintegration to the chemical soup... The constituent elements flow back into totality, images of lost and/or discarded memories from the private lives of unknown strangers and return to abstraction, chaotic potential. As viewers, we know nothing about the people in the photos, yet we can't avoid relating. The piece is hypnotic, poignant, and conjures a painfully tender nostalgia. What are your thoughts around this work, and about memories and their transitory, fleeting nature?
PCB: While working on this piece, I wanted to evoke something that’s almost impossible to visualize, the way in which fragments of images and experiences represent themselves while we’re dreaming; the dramaturgy and narrative composition of the dream, simultaneously having and lacking logical order. The sensory impressions of dreams consist of flickering images, sounds are audible, and we experience tactile, bodily sensations. This is what I’d like to call the particular language and form – or formulas – of dreaming. Dreams are so complex they can’t be represented or retold without significant loss of meaning.I consider the piece an endeavor, an experiment, nothing more and nothing less. Perhaps it focuses in on that which has been lost. As you write, perhaps it’s more about the impermanence of all things and all beings. Everything we have experienced dissolves and disintegrates. In the end, to sum it all up, we ask ourselves: What is actual fact, that which we call reality, and what is imaginary?
RH: Speaking of imagination: We’ve mentioned that the exhibition includes a series of photos depicting homeless people sleeping in their regular spots in Berlin – their homes in a sense. The title of the exhibition, ‘For we are such stuff as dreams are made on – and our little life is rounded with a sleep.’, points towards rest, death, reveries, materiality, impermanence. The fact that the title is a quote from Shakespeare's final play, The Tempest, holds a clue to the 'invisible' dramaturgical element within the works: You have told me that the subjects are not actually asleep: They act like they’re sleeping. The fine line between fiction and reality, where direction, poetry, the staged, and meticulously composed intersects with raw existence and lived life, is a recurrent theme in your practice. Can you say something about this 'balancing act between spheres', so to speak? The colliding of macro- and microcosm, the internal and the external? Tell us about these juxtapositions of the staged and the documentary, of fantasy, experiences, and external reality and how they present themselves throughout the exhibition.
PCB: I think we’re all actors in our own lives. We take on various roles in the office, at home, in different relationships, out in the streets. I am interested in the dissonance between who we represent ourselves as in public and who we really are, deep inside, as beings, in the innermost chambers of our souls.
In the ‘civilized world’, we are surrounded by forces that seduce us and work hard to turn us into ever more extreme consumers. Not unlike shopping and scrolling through the news, dreams can be a kind of intoxicating escapism. They carry us away from the grim, harsh reality ‘out there’. Here lies the core of the title, the quote from Prospero's monologue. That being said, logistically, it would be almost impossible to take authentically true photos of these homeless people while actually asleep. Manuell had to journey all around Berlin day and night merely to locate and arrange appointments with the homeless who had agreed to participate in the project, and the production involved quite a few unexpected challenges. These are people leading highly unpredictable lives, spending lots of time seeking out their next meal, collecting bottles, locating places to wash... In my ‘reconstructions’, they put on the roles of ‘sleeping protagonists’ of their own lives. The shadow play of dreams can be illuminating. It returns us to our true selves. Dreaming can play out as an unconscious processing of actual experiences based on fragments of real events and inner fantasies, yet still, we are ourselves in there, inside that Morpheal world of dreams. We let ourselves be swept away by their unlimited capacity to bridge the past and the present, that which has been, and sometimes what will be. Sleep is democratic, in the sense that it gives us all rest and opportunity to enter or escape into the landscape of dreams. Dreaming lets us relive our past, invites us inside and out into boundless adventures.
RH: ‘Our revels now are ended. These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air’, says Prospero. Much of your recent years’ work revolves around reflections on the classical elements, Air, Earth, Fire and Water. In one of the photographs in ‘For we are such stuff as dreams are made on – and our little life is rounded with a sleep.’, we witness a person lying sheltered under the roots of a fallen tree, perhaps toppled by the wind. Given that homeless people sleep outdoors... Does the element Air, in the tarot system being a symbol of the fleeting nature of our thoughts, lie at the core of this exhibition?
PCB: I wouldn't say the element Air was that prominent in my intention for this project, maybe Earth more so – in a figurative, more abstract, and wider sense. For me, dreams of Earth are, as postulated by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) in his 1948 thesis ‘La Terre et les Rêveries du Repos’ (‘earth and reveries of rest’), associated with a longing for rest. Bachelard uses the beautiful French word ‘rêverie’ to point towards correspondences between apparent opposites, referencing 18th to 20th century poetry. Reveries of Earth represent a sense of longing for peace and rest, perhaps to disappear down into the deepest humic layers, annihilate yourself, to rest beneath the protective blanket of Earth.
RH: The curtain falls… A few lines further down his monologue, Prospero states that ‘the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, and, like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind.’ Extreme weather rages near and far, forests burn, the destructive aspects of the elements become dominate. We can safely say that we – society – have stumbled in our path, in rotten roots of our own making. 'Obdachlos' is the German word for homeless. ‘Without roof over ones head. Being a resident of the woods, I’ve learnt about the baffling forces of trees. One thing I hadn’t considered is that trees fallen from the root tend to harbour enormous latent energy and might spring back to vertical stance without warning, so a shelter of roots could suddenly become our demise... And obviously you don’t want them falling on the roof of your house in a storm or whatnot. Without a roof over our head, we are powerless against the forces of nature. Is there an underlying warning to us all here?
PCB: Yes, perhaps. The exhibition isn’t devised as a warning on my part, if you mean from an environmental perspective, but when extreme weather rages – like the storm in Shakespeare's The Tempest – most of us can find protection indoors, in our own homes with no imminent danger of shipwreck. But the homeless are extremely exposed; they truly live at the mercy of the elements, whether they are sleeping outdoors in the bitter cold or trying to protect themselves from the burning summer sun.
RH: ‘Leave not a rack behind’, says Prospero. In this line, William Shakespeare really excels in his poetic virtuosity, puzzling literary scholars and translators alike. The word 'rack' and its many homonyms denotes a plethora of different meanings, for example a rain cloud, a certain medieval torture device, ‘cut of animal meat and bone’, ‘grating or open frame with bars or pegs upon which things are hung or placed’, and racks of most sorts – perhaps a skeleton? The Norwegian author André Bjerke appears to have gone to a Norse root in his translation of The Tempest, namely ‘rek’, meaning ‘jetsam, wreckage’. To me, Bjerke’s paraphrase of not leaving a rack behind resonates with Manuell's wise words at the end of your video interview: “And if I die one day, I can't take anything with me anyway.” As you say, commercial forces put us under constant pressure in their effort to reduce us to ‘consumers’. The paradox between economic growth and the destruction of our biotope is becoming ever more evident. Can we call the homeless anti-consumers of sorts? In the photos, I imagine I see all their belongings, clenched in their hands while sleeping, guarded by dogs sporting pacifiers as jewelry, using their backpacks as pillows. Can we regard living with such light material luggage as a heroic deed?
PCB: The homeless reuse what we have discarded. They collect bottles for a living, be it for food, drugs, or alcohol. This predicament we’re in is so complex, but it’s very true that we have become enormously obsessed with material things, houses, cabins, new cars, status symbols of all kinds. I find Manuell's statement important and true. We all know it, but don't want to think about it: A time will come when we are no longer here, when the lights are out, when we 'clock out' for the last time. I believe the homeless can show us a way back to a mode of anti-consumption in the sense that, when push comes to shove, we don't really need that much to live. Perhaps life is a fundamentally different experience when we possess less?
RH: To round off our little interview: What is a home to you? Have you thought about what life would be like for you if you were homeless yourself?
PCB: I associate the notion of home with stability, having a seat, a place to withdraw from the world out there. Manuell once told me I would be a hopeless, helpless homeless person. Maybe he meant I wouldn't be able to cope with being constantly on the run, treated badly, chased by the police, targeted and insulted. Merely the thought of begging strikes me as extremely humiliating. I suppose it’s like that for most of us. Or perhaps I would have managed just fine. Who knows what you’d be capable of while in survival mode? I imagine the essential thing here is flexibility, our capacity for adapting to circumstance and our particular predicament. Still, I believe most homeless people struggle with a chronic sense of longing, a deep grief for the loss of security that a home represents. Even those we can call voluntarily homeless. I sometimes daydream about being a hermit in a small cabin in the woods, without internet connection, off-grid, outside of this 'rat race' called society. About leading a simple life, about living in harmony with the elements and in closer contact with nature and the seasons. I think this is an escapist fantasy shared by many: To be able to step out of the spectacle we call society, go back to scratch, and live in peaceful austerity. In any case, my little fantasy scenario, possibly inspired by Walden by American author H.D. Thoreau, would be one of my own choosing and my own volition. I would, in contrast to the homeless of the cities, not be forced to hide under bridges or sneak into railway stations to get a few hours' sleep – before the struggle for survival continues and our delusional revels, if you will, start all over again.